The Diary Of An Expectant Father (The Diary Of A Father Book 1) Read online

a girl grows into a woman thinking that she’ll find out she’s to be a mother after defacing a Kodak photo booth.

  I walked Alison to the taxi rank, promised I’d call her tomorrow and came home to empty a bottle of Radox into my eyes.

  I’m not sure how I feel really. Other than dirty, that is. I’ll reassess in the morning.

  1.00 a.m.

  I’ve just woken up in a cold sweat. This is massive. How will I cope? What will I do? Can I afford it? How am I going to tell my parents? Life is going to change drastically in nine months.

  Too many questions.

  Thursday January 27th 2012

  I hardly slept a wink after I’d woken up in a sweat. All I could think about was how there are so many ways in which I can screw this up. Alison seems so in control and with it. Well, she didn’t sound scared on the phone, anyway, far from it. She sounded excited. We’ve only been together a few weeks. I hope I’ve not been trapped in a honey trap or whatever they call it these days. I’ve read about women like that in the paper. They get men into bed, get pregnant, and then latch onto them for life, like an evil stick insect.

  I like Alison, I like her a lot. I mean I have to, she’s the only woman who hasn’t dumped me after three or four dates. Except for the incident with the piss yesterday, but I’ve decided to chalk that one down to experience and never again go anywhere near a photo booth while a woman, mine or anyone else’s, is taking a pregnancy test in there. It’s my own fault; I should have seen the danger in that situation. I was like a child wandering out into the road, no sense of the impending doom that awaited me. She’s not a bad person, either. Anyone who looks after old people for a living can’t be a bad person, She’s also a qualified nurse, it’s always good to have a nurse about the place.

  Today dragged, I couldn’t concentrate on the job in hand. Jane, my boss, started me off on the grill, which meant I had to cook all the bacon and have it ready for when the workers came in between seven and nine, then keep it going but also make sure that there was a supply of cheese on toast, too. It takes skill and timing to get it right when one is feeling OK with the world, and today I wasn’t, which meant some of the workers got bacon that had only been cooked on one side, and the queue for cheese on toast was huge.

  If the workers lean over the counter a bit they can see who’s working the grill and tend to shout over ‘Hurry the fuck up’ if the cheese on toast isn’t coming quick enough. I’ve told Jane that we need more grills in order to get the most popular item cooked and served quicker, but she’s not made it happen. It’s tense work and today I just couldn’t do it. Once I’d dropped a tray of the stuff in front of the eyes of the very people waiting for it, Jane realised that if she wanted to get through the day without having to deal with endless complaints forms (which dictate our weekly bonus) it was time to move me to something less important.

  That job was loading and unloading the dishwasher, which is the worst job in the kitchen and normally considered punishment. On the plus side, Boris was delighted to come off dishwasher duty and stop being punished for drinking the cooking wine three weeks ago. I think three weeks’ washing up isn’t punishment enough for drinking at work, but apparently dropping cheese on toast is worse than that. Still, I didn’t have to deal with people shouting, or any scalding hot cheese that not only burns when it comes into contact with skin, but also sticks to it.

  It’s fair to say that today wasn’t good. I spent the remainder of the shift loading and unloading the dishwasher. It was nice to have such a simplistic job, actually, as it allowed my mind to wander, but not too much. I went through the fears I had one by one and tried to think about them in a logical way. Here is my list of fears:

  1) That I’ll be a terrible father.

  2) That the baby won’t like me.

  3) That I’ll somehow screw up the kid so it ends up being a mass murderer or something.

  4) That if the above happens, The Sun will do an investigation into the killer’s family and expose me as a loser.

  5) That Alison will run off with the baby and I’ll be one of those fathers that doesn’t get to see his kid until he dresses up like Batman and climbs something tall.

  6) That I won’t be able to afford a baby.

  7) That it’ll grow up and be like me.

  8) That the baby will have a disability and be reliant on me for life.

  9) That the baby will have ADHD and be an absolute nightmare.

  10) That my nights will become even more sleepless.

  When I’ve listed it like, that I’m glad I only went through them one at a time as that is a terrifying list to see all in one go.

  Here is my rationale:

  1) You might be, but everyone learns and there are classes on being a good father and loads of books you can read, doing this might just upgrade you from ‘terrible’ to ‘mildly pathetic’.

  2) Babies don’t dislike people, they don’t know how to. I can manipulate it into liking me.

  3) See point 1, but also research on the Internet ‘how to make sure your child isn’t a killer’.

  4) See points 1 and 3.

  5) I’ll have to ask Alison to marry me, she’ll always be traceable then as she’ll have my name.

  6) I’ve thought more and more about this and if I marry Alison, then we’ll live together and we’ll have more money. Failing that, we could both give up work; I read all the time in the paper that people who don’t work have more money than people who do. Failing that, I could stop spending all my money on myself. So there are options.

  7) Of course it might. OR it might grow up and be like Alison. If we raise it like Alison then everything will be alright. Either that or I completely change my life around. I think it would be easier to raise it like Alison.

  8) This is a natural fear all parents have, and most babies don’t have disabilities or the human race wouldn’t survive.

  9) That’ll be payback for me being a nightmare.

  10) Ear plugs are cheap and Alison will be off work anyway, so she’ll be happy to get up and look after the little one.

  11) Just an extra: this is all months away. I don’t need to worry so much. Nine months takes ages to pass.

  Not a complete saviour of a list, but it certainly got me through the day at the dishwasher.

  Alison has been on the phone this evening asking when we are going to make the news public. By 'public' she means telling her mum and then putting it on Facebook. I suggested we wait at least until we’ve been to the doctor’s before we spoke to her parents, Alison wasn’t so sure. Well, I say wasn’t sure, she’d already told her mum, who in turn has told her dad. I think she did it last night as soon as she got home. I’ve not even met either of her parents yet. I suppose I’ll have to at some point now.

  I think I’ll start another 'fears' list.

  Friday January 28th 2012

  Seeing as I’m writing a diary, I might as well tell you how it all started with Alison. Just in case all you alien warlords are interested in human relations.

  I was out on my work’s Christmas meal; we went for Mexican food, which I still think was chosen on purpose because everyone knew that I didn’t actually like Mexican food. It wasn’t at all Christmassy. Thankfully I’ve left the Bus Company now and have a new job in the local department store’s staff kitchen. It’s a bit of a better job and there’s free food, so it’s not terrible.

  Anyway, back to the Christmas night out. After I’d been coaxed into eating some vile mince that was so spicy it tasted like pen ink, Joey, the popular confident manager, convinced me that a tequila would ‘cleanse my palate’ – which was a complete lie. That was like pouring petrol into my mouth, which on top of the taste of pen ink caused me to be sick, which luckily went mostly under the table. I did feel the effect of the tequila, though, and it was good. Within a few minutes I didn’t care about embarrassing myself by being sick. So, on Joey’s advice I had a couple more and joined in with the dancing. I didn’t even care that everyone I worked with was p
ointing, laughing and filming me; I was enjoying myself. The evening went on and we ended up in a club. That was where I met Alison.

  She was dancing on her own, but she explained that she had been with friends and definitely isn’t the type of loser that goes clubbing on her own. In a way I’m glad that my work colleagues had their phone cameras pointed at me all night in the hope of catching something they could put on Facebook, as they caught the first kiss between me and Alison, the first dance, the first fumble outside the club, it’s all there on Facebook ready for when I get old and want to look back on my life. I knew they were doing it to take the piss, but this time the joke was on them because Alison was at my house the next morning.

  I wasn’t a virgin before I met her, but I wasn’t exactly well versed in sex … and I still wasn’t, as I couldn’t really remember if we’d done ‘it’ or not. It’s not the sort of thing that you should really ask the person you wake up next to, so I was more than pleased when Alison asked me if we’d had sex. It was the first thing she said, actually. When I replied with a blank look on my face, she dug her hands under the covers for a minute, had a shufty round then confirmed that she thought we had. I don’t even want to know what it was she was doing, but I was glad that I could go into work and tell everyone that I’d definitely done ‘it’ and declare the graffiti on the wall invalid.

  I didn’t tell anyone in